The Moral Equivalent to the Eat-Everything Weight Loss Diet

Actually, if those words make you bristle a little, there’s some history. About 400 years ago, the enlightenment began to erode the foundation of society’s religious and political fundamentalism. Ever since, people have been less willing to take dictation. It’s gotten harder to just tell people what to do. We’re growing up. We no longer allow ourselves to stay children all our lives, doing what our parents, priests, and elders tell us to do merely because they say so.

So take my advice: Think for yourself.

Of course, some folks fear that with more people thinking for themselves, society will fall apart. So there’s a backlash. Some of us are surging back toward fundamentalism because the world seems dangerously immoral without more structure.

I don’t think we’re becoming immoral in the sense of abandoning morals so much as we’re becoming diversely and divergently moral. We still use moral arguments to justify our behavior, but we tend to do it more ad hoc, pulling out whatever moral code serves our interests best in any given situation.

For example, if you’re offended by someone’s honest feedback you might retaliate with the moral argument that one should always be more diplomatic. And if you’re offended that someone didn’t give you feedback earlier you can strike back with the moral argument that one should always be honest.

If you want people to do what you tell them to, you can employ the moral argument that one should always be cooperative. If you want to avoid doing what they tell you to do, you can employ the moral argument that people should allow each other their liberty and freedom.

I like to eat. If I’m selective, I can summon a diet to endorse any treat I want. That bacon looks good. Pritikin’s says I can have all I want. Those waffles look good. The Bread For Life diet says I can have them. That cheesecake looks good. The High-Dairy Diet says go for it.

Call it the Selective Omni-Diet (SOD) approach. With as many diets as there are to choose from there’s probably one out there that says its fine for me to eat any and everything I like. And I’m always in total compliance with a diet!

Well some diet or other. I’ve used the SOD approach for years. Strangely I haven’t lost much weight. But I’ve been very cooperative with it and I love it because it allows me my liberty and freedom.

No, not really. Me personally, I eat pretty well, a lot of tofu and greens. But you get my point and you can see the parallel: I think we’re selective omni-moralist too. Highly moral, but omni-moral so free to be you and me.

It’s different from moral relativism, which is what the backlash fundamentalists fear most. They fear that we’re saying “hey man, it’s all good, live and let live, you believe what you want; I’ll believe what I want.”

I don’t think we are moral relativists. We don’t say it’s all good. We say that a particular moral is absolutely true, but don’t hold ourselves to its moral standard any more than the Pritikin-citing, bacon-eating SOD when he switches to waffles. We can summon a moral from any of a vast library of moral codes whenever we need it and then forget it when it becomes inconvenient.

In this, the fundamentalists are at least as bad as the rest of us. See, they have a secret weapon. They join a club that claims to be the last hope for consistent moral standards and they believe that simply by joining, they become permanently consistent so there’s no reason to ever wonder ever again whether they are inconsistent.

Call a non-fundamentalist on his inconsistency, there’s a chance he’ll listen and consider your argument. Not a great chance—we all hate to be called on our inconsistencies–but still a chance. A fundamentalist of whatever brand will, in effect, pull out his membership card and say, “Impossible, I’ve been officially and permanently cleared. How could I possibly be inconsistent? I’m one of the few remaining heroes making the world safe again for consistent absolute moral principles. I’m a member of the club that is officially and permanently cleared of any potential for inconsistency ever again.”

In a way it’s nothing new. Before the enlightenment religious and political leaders all over the world employed morality in an ad hoc manner while claiming to be the sole champions of moral consistency. What has changed is that many of us have decided to stop obeying those leaders and to think for ourselves. One of the consequences is a lot of ad hoc moralizing.

I'm about to read your post in its entirety, but the subtitle pops so well, I had to pre-compliment you. It's been awhile since I've written, but I can already tell this post will have your usual delightful sarcasm. Kudos!

Another gem, Doc. What are some ideas you have for how individuals can decrease the pressure valve on their 'ad hoc' moralizing? I myself usually openly declare that I may be going against principles I have stated in the past when I've done so, but I'm able to do this because of a self-awareness that most people haven't developed for themselves. Majority of the time I just keep my mouth shut, if for no other reason I don't feel like hearing any whining about double standards, etc. But again, what have you done in your life to keep your moralizing in check, and to cope with the moralizing of others. I'm talking specific techniques, if you have any.

The real problem is that people with different moral standards have a rough time getting along and getting things done that have group benefits. i.e. when values become too chaotic or ego driven there are in fact social consequences.

I look at my parents marriage for instance and then I look at my sisters, my mother believes committing to a person for life, my sister doesn't.

Committing to someone for life has practical benefits - i.e. time you waste going from partner to partner, is time you waste not building a life financially together.

My parents are financially ahead of at least 70% of north american society and a lot of it has to do with them sticking together.

I think people are too quick to look at the source of morality rather then the pragmatic benefits this or that moral principle provides economically and otherwise.

I've come to see morals as something only really intelligent people can fully understand and that the vast majority of morals are guidelines and that like any tool one has to use different principles with great skill and care.

It's a great question. The standard question is how to keep others from doing it, but yours is the harder question. The best trick I've found is the ad-hoc moralist's equivalent to Mirroring. Mirroring is a non-fakable way of demonstrating that you heard someone. You don't just give it 'I hear you man" lip service, you have to say back what you heard.

I operate on an assumption that when I am annoyed at someone's behavior enough to moralize at them, my mind evacuates any recollection of me ever doing something similar to what they're doing. To keep the image gross, I think of it as akin to evacuating yourself in panic. It's like my anger puts me in a state of shock and to ready myself for moral combat, I erase from memory all self-incriminating equivalent behavior. That way my double-standard can go into unrestrained full swing.

So that's the behavior to counter, and not just with a "hey man I'm not perfect, but..." or an "I do it too." A non-fakable counter to the double-standard evacuation reflex is to remember a time when I did the same thing. If I'm angry at someone I trust, I aim to site chapter and verse on my equivalent. And I try to find the most comparably bad example I can. It's not OK to say "How dare you steal. Of course I too have stolen. I took a penny candy at age 5"

And I might still be mad at them, so I also have to remember that we may find ourselves debating severity of degree. It's not a double standard for me to say I do it too but you did it in excess of tolerable levels. I learned this from my Republican friends, many of which have learned the formulaic "you do it too" retort. So you can call them on the outrageous slanders they perpetrate and they'll say "yeah but Democrats aren't saints. You use rhetoric too." Which is fine and true and I'll still fight them over questions of degree, and to my sense of fairness that's not a double standard.

Now what I've described here as a technique is idealized. Do I really prevent evacuation every time? No. For that I have the five hour rule. I turn ouch into umbrage like anyone. But within five hours max, I better have calmed down enough to visit the possibility that my umbrage is unjustified. Ask my friends, but I think I do pretty well at that.

I think the techniques your asking for are among the most necessary to human survival and in the shortest supply for understandable reasons. I think you need to make it through all of these steps to where you would even want to develop such techniques: